The Free

China Celebrates Completion of 1,800-mile Green Belt surrounding its Harshest Desert- after nearly 50 years

The completion of the Taklamakan project is not the end but rather a stepping stone toward a greener and more sustainable future for the region.

by True Activist on 7 Feb 2025 via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FX3

China’s largest desert fully encircled with green belt

For nearly five decades, China has undertaken a monumental ecological effort to combat desertification in one of the world’s most hostile environments—the Taklamakan Desert.

On Thursday, the People’s Daily reported that the ambitious project to encircle the desert with a green belt of trees has been completed, marking the end of a journey fraught with setbacks but full of determination.

A ‘Green’ Great Wall for the Taklamakan

Last week, workers planted the final 100 trees on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert, completing what is often referred to as China’s “Green Great Wall.”

This initiative aims to mitigate the adverse effects of the Taklamakan, a vast sea of shifting sands located in northwestern China. Known as the second-largest shifting sand desert in the world, its name ominously translates to “Go in and don’t come out,” reflecting its inhospitable nature.

The desert is also the farthest point from any ocean, making its surrounding areas some of the most isolated and impoverished regions in China.

The Taklamakan Desert has long posed challenges for northern and western Chinese provinces, as strong winds carry dust and sand into these regions.

These storms degrade air quality, threaten agricultural productivity, and contribute to desertification.

In response, China initiated the “Three-North Shelterbelt” project in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, aiming to combat these environmental challenges by planting trees on a massive scale.

Transforming the Landscape

Since its inception, the project has led to the planting of over 30 million hectares (116,000 square miles) of trees.

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean for Freedom and State Control?

‘We are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and harassed”

by John & Nisha Whitehead at off-guardian via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FWJ Tgram.. https://t.me/thefreeonline/2180

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the US American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

The Rise Of The Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean For Freedom

The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

Fanfare for Anarchism: A Home for the Homeless

“Life itself is anarchist, which explains why anarchistic forms of sociality surface again and again, throughout history, even in the teeth of the most oppressive social conditions imaginable”.

by Darren Allen The Acorn 95 at Nevermore via thefreeomline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FWT

Occasionally you hear people complain about being ‘politically homeless’. What they tend to mean is either that there is no longer a traditional left-wing, which sought to manage people and nature in the name of a global ‘society’, or that there is no longer a traditional right-wing, which sought to subjugate people and nature in the name of a national ‘tradition’.

The reason they’ve departed from political life is that in our neoliberal, postmodern, online unworld, society no longer exists, the Western working class has been either weakened or subsumed into the [decaying] middle-class and nations are now irrelevant, as are institutions, so there is no place left for either the ideology of the traditional management class (socialism) or for the traditional owner class (capitalism), and this has left those who still adhere to them, ‘homeless’.

While such people remain blind to the true nature of the postmodern condition — a consequence of technocratic capitalism and technocratic socialism — they will be unable to even consider the only home that can ever welcome them; Anarchism…

I say ‘perennial’ because, as I have argued in an introductory article, nature is anarchist, friendship is anarchist, work is anarchist (when the boss is absent), romantic love is anarchist, scientific endeavour is anarchist, all primal (pre-agricultural, pre-conquest) societies were anarchist and artistic creation is anarchist. Life itself is anarchist, which explains why anarchistic forms of sociality surface again and again, throughout history, even in the teeth of the most oppressive social conditions imaginable. Anarchism springs up in prisons, in shanty towns, in peasant communes and even occasionally, and most amazingly, in the modern workplace. Anarchism sprouts through the cracks of the system as weeds do between its paving stones, because it represents the root and spring of our social nature.

You would think then that anarchism would be a popular way of life today. You would think that a movement which in essence includes all great artists and scientists [1] would be extremely attractive. You’d think that a genuine alternative to the system-friendly managerialism of the left and the system-friendly capitalism of the right would be an easy pitch. You’d think that an approach to politics which, like the majority of populations everywhere, pushes leftwards economically (redistributing wealth) and rightwards socially (enforcing organic cultural borders), would find a great deal of popular support. You’d think! But I’m afraid you’d be wrong, for two basic reasons.

Firstly, most people do not want the spiritual and intellectual freedom that anarchism represents. It terrifies them. They want to avoid the crushing oppression of worldly life, but they cling to the institutions, the money, the capital, the comfort, the routine, the technology and the mindless work that are all preconditions of that life.